Capital and Consolidation

• Medtronic paid $700 million for Sentire distribution rights rather than repeat its 13 year Hugo build
• SoftBank is buying ABB Robotics for $5.4 billion while eyeing a $6 billion stake in 1X
• Unitree's IPO closed at $50.7 billion, ahead of Figure's $39 billion and NEURA's $7 billion
• Twelve humanoid startups now carry $73 billion in combined valuations, five of them Chinese
• Nscale and Figure committed $3.5 billion in compute, scaling past $6 billion
• Antioch raised $32 million, and Maven Robotics surfaced with $100 million after two stealth years
• Defiance launched the first US actuator ETF, tracking parts worth 40 to 60 percent of a humanoid's cost

‍

Scaling Production

• UBTECH's Liuzhou factory targets 10,000-plus humanoids a year, one every 10 minutes
• XPeng's Guangzhou line walked its first IRON humanoid off under its own power
• AGIBOT is on pace for 15,000 units this year, the industry's largest declared output
• Amazon runs over one million robots across 300-plus facilities via its DeepFleet system
• Agility's Digit 5 arrives after 65,000-plus fleet hours, now with a 50-pound lift capacity
• Universal Robots launched its AI-ready Gen 7 platform at IMTS Chicago
• Skild crossed $100 million ARR about ten months after its first deployment

‍

Technical Frontiers

• Zipeng Fu's OM-1 model zero-shot generalizes across arms and humanoids with no teleoperation
• NVIDIA, CMU and Berkeley's ENPIRE lets coding agents refine robot policies on real hardware
• REFINE-DP hit 95 to 97 percent success from just 50 demonstrations, a 20-fold efficiency gain
• Wetour Robotics found vision alone loses the hand in 21.8 percent of frames
• Anto Patrex says 100ms inference leaves robots blind for 98ms of real physics
• Figure's Brett Adcock called tendon-based hands his biggest mistake, 1X's Bernt Bornich disagrees
• GPT-6 Astra scored 95 percent on a robot task versus 40 percent for Fable 5.1

‍

The Global Race

• Europe's humanoid builders now include NEURA Robotics, Wandercraft, PAL Robotics and Agile Robots
• SECO, NEURA Robotics and Qualcomm partnered to build physical AI hardware in Europe
• NEURA Robotics acquired Adlatus Robotics amid a wider wave of European tech funding
• Munich hosted Europe's first Physical AI Summit for industrial and defense leaders
• China's EV and battery sector now funds and staffs its humanoid makers directly
• An analyst estimates 50 to 70 percent of China's humanoids won't do paid work this year
• Imec convened a robotics advisory board, framing power and heat as semiconductor problems

‍

Healthcare and Surgery

• Medtronic's Hugo robot took 13 years to reach US clearance
• The surgical robotics market is estimated at $17 billion in 2026, rising above $45 billion by 2033
• A surgeon in Rome operated on a patient 8,000 kilometers away in Beijing over 5G
• Shane Neman argues physical AI is splitting into a funded defense camp and an overlooked healthcare one

‍

Thanks to Lisa Voronkova, Robert Little, Mete Gultekin, Vlad Oleksiienko, Rayyan Islam, Harry Mellsop, Kingsley Advani, Leo Su, Florian Bansac, Adrian Macneil, Dimitrios Spiliopoulos, Ribin Mathew, Michael Beer, Kyle Hulse, Jean-Pierre Hathout, Christopher Savoia, Zipeng Fu, Prof. Dr.-Ing. Lars N. Josler, Ye Zhao, Srinivasa Rao Aluri, Anto Patrex, Peter Kappes, Jay C., Erdem Ürün, Massimo Mauri, Seb Johnson, Bercan Kilic, Yair Reem, Tim Iskhak, Kelly Chen, Harikeshav Narayan, Onur Sezgin and Shane Neman for the insight behind this edition. Find the full list of posts and voices on LinkedIn: